Europe (English)

Europe, to you,by you, praising you, I present my plea from this century's blind botching,and as others bury you, tolling through the night, with a shrill dithyramb, with joy,with good morning I greet you.

My stepmother even, then I would contend for you and spank you with mouthings and prank you with kisses and yoke you in phrases, so at last you love me.

From here who could tear me,from here who could tear me, could snatch from your bosom? Have I not always been your pure son, and faithful? Have I not always since I was a brat, sittingat night in the rays of my lamp, learning your lesson, attending, marvelling at your hundred-tongued speech, so that each word insinuated itself in my heart? Since then my ravings have been understood; wherever they fling me I have hundreds of kinsmen, wherever they break me I have one thousand brothers.

Did I never notice the old German womenwho shuffled through showers in Cologne, the elfin French girls cavorting so lightly in Paris,in London the silvery hair of their lordships,and did I not eat and drink in the workers' tenements in family rooms with noisy Italians?Did I never feel in the marrow the pain of the Slav, the pallor, the tedium, the golden-tinged, weary, Slavonic sorrowful radiance?These people belong to the sweetness my earth holds, my heart has expanded to fit them within.

You too must welcome meto the kindness of your hearts, you bards and buglersof distant peoples,quarrel for all of us here against those who would quarrel with us for the sake of our mother and we shall quarrel for you here so that your mother shall live.

Cry out togetherEurope's courageous spirits, poets,that only a coward beast is cowering in its cave, and only a dingy mole is digging its tunnel. Sing out together,lights and princes and spirits of princes, that soul is our castle, our castle in air, which we shall build skyward with resolute love out of phrases of air.begin again your new building, poets, air-fortress warriors.